All Teachers Are Vulnerable but Especially Gay Teachers: Using Composite Fictions to Protect Research Participants in Pupil—Teacher Sex-Related Research

Abstract

The ways in which the media searches out, depicts, and writes about teacher—pupil sex-related topics have implications both for researchers working in the area and, sometimes more seriously, for the people who participate in and contribute to that research as respondents. In this article, the authors discuss, and provide an example of, the composite fiction strategy they developed and decided to adopt primarily for purposes of protection when writing up a project that investigated the perceptions and experiences of teachers (and those of members of their families, their friends, and colleagues) who had been accused of sexual abuse of pupils, which they said they had not committed and of which they were eventually cleared.